Today, I visited Chinaplas, Asia’s No. 1 Exhibition on the Plastics and Rubber Industries at the CECF Pazhou Complex. The library of my university provided free tickets for student; I got one. It’s an exciting day; it is a huge show.

The whole 1st floor of the hall is for machinery show, and part of the 2nd floor for raw materials.

On the 1st floor, 99% of the sites were showing injection molding machines. There were only one or two film or bottle blowing machines. Some smaller sites were showing screws, syringes, valves, and various thermo-sensors and -controllers. Unlike most of the sites which promotes hardwares, one special site was promoting a software for mold design and analysis (something like Pro/E). There was a speaker giving a small-scale PowerPoint presentation in the site, who emphasized the analysis features of the software such as prediction of the internal stress of the product which may lead to distortion when cooling.

I felt more at home on the 2nd floor as a polymer chemist. I saw such familiar brands as Du Pont, Dow, BASF, Bayer, Exxonmobil, etc. GE was definitely the most noticeable absence, while Sabic the presence, probably due to the recent big sale.

As to the products, most of the companies are selling basic raw materials such as PE, PP, PS, PET, sometimes also PA, POM. Still there are several companies, mainly Chinese ones, were selling more advanced polymers like liquid crystal polymers, PPS, or PBT. A highlights is the polyamide 12 elastomer products from UBE Industries (I declare they did not pay me anything for the mentioning here). In fact the polymer is a block copolymer of PA12, serving as the hard segment and a polyether, as the soft segment. The supramolecular structure of the elastomer is analogous to that of the TPU elastomer, while the PA12 counterpart show comparatively higher low-temperature performance, transparency and overall stability. I very much love one of the posters on which two AFM images are provided to elucidate the special micro-phase separation of a injection molded sample. They are both maps of modulus by tapping mode, where we can see hard and soft regions with high contrast. This made me feel like I’m reading papers in an ordinary day. Another keyword that attracted my attention is ‘carbon nanotubes’. It appeared as one of the features of a company’s products. In fact it is just a polymer composites filled with CNTs.

I could found only BASF’s Ecoflex® and Du Pont’s Sorona® and Hytrel® belonging to degradable polymer. No other PLA or PHB promotion was found. Is China not prepared to enter the corn-based age? I couldn’t find any photoelectric polymers either, such as some polymeric OLED, flexible devices, which I had wished to see. PP, PP, and again PP… what’s the difference between PP from Dow and BASF, besides price?


Bayer MaterialsScience had the most extravagant site. There was a car, which was cool, and a model, which was dangerously beautiful! Exxonmobil ranked the second with its full Chinese Style decoration.

For a blogging to be constructive, I should have interviewed someone, asking questions like: ‘Is it you first visit to China?’, ‘How do you feel about this exhibition?’, ‘How do you feel about Chinese plastics market’, etc. and post the answers here, but obviously I’m not the right person to do this. I did take several photos, though and you can watch the album here.